i’d heard of super pac-man, but its availability has been somewhat spotty over the years and it wasn’t until namco museum remix and namco museum megamix that it became more readily available. at its core the game is much the same as the original pac-man in that you’ll be chomping everything in sight and avoiding ghosts until you get a power pellet, at which point the tables turn and you try to chase them down to rack up points. super pac-man adds a new twist in that some munchables are locked behind doors, and you have to nab keys located in regular spots on the board in order to unlock them. a “super” pellet transforms ol’ pac into the eponymous “super pac-man” who not only becomes big and can “fly” over ghosts and burst through doors without a key, but he can also zoom around the board by holding down a button while steering as usual. there’s also a bonus level every four boards which is the same as a regular board except there are no ghosts, you have constant super power, and there’s a time limit.

i should preface my analysis of the game by saying that ms. pac-man was one of the games i made a beeline for at my local chuck e. cheese’s growing up and that i owned the original NES version of pac-man, and so although i’m not anywhere near a competitive player, i’m not a casual player either. i enjoyed the change of pace of super pac-man, and it was interesting to see how even though the board remains the same, the layout can feel quite different based on which doors are open and which are closed. the game becomes increasingly harder by making it so that keys open doors that are located far away from them, which does help add variety.

as someone who grew up playing pac-man and ms. pac-man the problem, though, is that this game doesn’t really let you get settled into a groove. in pac-man seeing the same board over and over again got a bit tiresome, but ms. pac-man has four boards which provides a good amount of variety. there’s no way of just looking at a board in super pac-man and knowing which doors the keys will unlock, which is good for variety but bad for getting into the zone. with more time i’m sure you could learn that board # X corresponds to configuration Y and i suppose eventually i would be able to adjust to having to spend every moment reacting on the fly, but in the end i just felt like the changes gave the game a new feel that just wasn’t as much fun. (compare to pac-man arrangement from 1996, which i quite enjoyed.) the wii remote controller worked fine, although the D-pad didn’t allow the really precise movements the game required: next time i’ll have to try using the nunchuk or wii classic controllers instead. last thing: as with other games on the compilation, the version of the game in namco museum megamix offers a stage select, which is great to have.

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when it comes to co-op sessions with my bf, i tend to try fairly random games to see if any happen to pique his interest since the usual staples (e.g. mario kart, smash bros., etc.) are somewhat lost on him. most recently we tried out the arcade version of smash TV via the midway arcade treasures compilation on PS2 (also available on gamecube, and xbox). this review gives a good run-down of the SNES port, and i agree with his description that this game is a unique blend of run ‘n gun with shoot ’em up elements. basically you’re a guy with a gun moving from single-screen room to single-screen room, 2-D zelda style, shooting down waves upon waves of baddies. the 360-degree shooting action reminded me somewhat of the geometry wars games, although the over-the-top gladiatorial game show festivities of smash TV are far from the clean, cool aesthetics of those games.

as an arcade classic smash TV was clearly designed to munch quarters: it starts off at a pace where a decent amount of skill will get you through unscathed, but by the time you get to the middle and late stages it’s clear you’d need a lot of practice to last even a minute. thankfully this release provides unlimited continues, so getting to the end is just a matter of patience. the power-ups are fun and somewhat reminiscent of the contra series, which preceded it by a few years. the contra series also includes co-op to double the fun, and both share a vaguely similar “rad” late 80’s vibe as well, and although the contra games also included top-down stages, smash TV‘s single-screen stages are way more fun. bosses are large and colorful and its humor is still effective 25 years later. a common point of discussion regarding the console versions is the various levels of awkwardness of the controls: in most cases you’re left having to use four buttons to replace the 8-way joystick for indicating your firing direction. in my casual run-through i didn’t find it to be a problem, but if you were trying to really refine your game an alternate scheme would be highly beneficial. there’s a maze aspect to finding the easiest path to get through each set of levels which would also make more of a difference on a coin-counting playthrough.

it’s just as well that i never encountered this game in the arcade growing up since i would’ve wasted a lot of money on it. as it is, this was a nice short game, and i wouldn’t mind giving it another whirl at some point, although i’m leery of other versions such as the popular SNES version since they lack the unlimited continues of this port.

…multiple Super moves per character, different levels of Super move power, the ability to taunt your opponent, air blocking, Chain Combos and Alpha Counters. Chain Combos allowed the player to cancel the animation of a standard attack with another standard attack effectively chaining moves together.

suffice it to say, for a casual street fighter like myself, the finer points of this iteration were generally lost on me. i studied up on super moves but didn’t bother mastering chain combos and alpha counters, although i’m sure that in not doing so i’ve earned the scorn of self-titled “hardcore” gamers everywhere. haha. but in any case, i was fine getting through the game with my go-to guy, ryu. i was happy to rely on his familiar moveset, and i randomly picked the new-to-the-roster rose as another character to spend time with. that turned out to be a bit of a disappointment since her moveset was, for the most part, very similar to ryu’s, but she did have m. bison as her final boss instead of sagat which helped make my time with her more worthwhile.

in terms of progressing from SFII, the expansion of super moves in alpha was interesting and does lead to some strategizing which is nice (do you use up just part of your saved-up super meter for one special move or do you blow it all on a more-powerful attack that may be blocked?), although this game just about reaches my limit of how much i’m willing to tolerate in terms of moves that are complicated and too hard to execute. the game adopts cartoonier visuals, but they were a nice change of pace so i didn’t mind them. the cast didn’t feel that different from SFII, though, but i’m hardly an expert on that.

anyway, i don’t have a whole lot more to say about the game. i’m sure fighter enthusiasts could write volumes about the progression of the series, but i was happy to give this game a whirl and move on. i don’t have any plans to get into alpha 2 and alpha 3, and am setting my sights on SFIII next. hopefully i’ll finally be able to get to that before another four years goes by!

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like xevious, twinbee is another game that made a bigger blip on my radar than it normally would have thanks to its reappearance as part of the 3D classics series in which classic games are given new 3-D visuals (thanks to the 3DS’s glasses-free 3D capabilities). again, before jumping into the remake i tracked down a version closer to the original, in this case konami classics arcade hits for DS. this version is perfectly serviceable, esp. on a DSi XL or 3DS XL, and although it lets you tweak options to give you more chances and lower the score at which you earn the one 1up, it unfortunately doesn’t give you unlimited continues, or any continues at all for that matter.

the series is apparently quite big in its native japan, but almost entirely unknown here (although apparently its sequel was released in the US as “stinger” on NES). the game is apparently part of a sub-genre of shoot-’em-ups, known as “cute-’em-ups” because they’re shoot-’em-ups with a cute exterior (although in this case that certainly doesn’t mean they compromise on the difficulty level). it looks like later entries in the series are far wackier, whereas in this game the fanciful enemies (such as vegetables, including eggplants and carrots, and cutlery) mostly just look like the typical bug-like aliens you’d see in most shooters.

the game plays very similarly to xevious in that you shoot bullets at flying enemies and drop bombs on enemies on the ground. the cuteness factors into a couple of the central game mechanics, including your character’s (a sentient ship’s) arms. if both are hit then you can’t drop bombs on ground enemies, but once per life an “ambulance” appears to repair them. also, although i didn’t get to try it, apparently the game has co-op play, and you can join hands with the other player to launch a powerful attack, among other team-up attacks.

the game mechanic that perhaps most defines the series is the bell power-up system, in which you shoot bells that are normally yellow, but after a certain number of shots (5, 10, 15, or 20) change color and if collected give a different power up, two of which are mutually exclusive. hardcoregaming101.net summarizes the system well when it says:

The bell power-up system is a “love it or hate it” issue: those bells are difficult to get and have tendency to fall to the bottom of the screen very quickly. Moreover, the color change pattern can be frustrating: it requires several shots to obtain the desired color, but only a single shot more and you’ll have to restart the loop. As a result, unlike the friendly Gradius bar, you’ll find yourself fighting against the bells almost as much as the enemies.

i fell pretty squarely into the “hate it” camp. although it sounds like it would make the game more interesting, it just makes the game massively more frustrating and raises the difficulty level beyond what is already a decently challenging level. what would have been a tolerably difficult shooter ends up being more annoying than fun, and i found that i was relying on luck to get the by-far-best power-up (the shield). like gradius and other games that rely on a sequence of power-ups, i often felt completely screwed once i lost a ship and had to start from scratch, esp. since the shield is so essential to progressing through the game. it’s hard to fault the game for being a difficult arcade game designed to munch quarters, but although i liked it better than xevious, its cuteness, which was supposedly one of its selling points, wasn’t nearly amped up enough to keep me playing. it may be that i enjoy its sequels more, esp. since i’m a fan of japanese wackiness, but for now i’m happy to set this aside until i revisit the 3DS version (which incidentally appears to be based on the famicom rather than arcade release).

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i finally broke out of my up-to-now handheld-only gaming year by continuing my exploration of run ‘n gun games outside of the contra series with the first game in the metal slug series, via metal slug anthology on wii. the game was enjoyable (and it was nice not to have to worry about running out of quarters/continues), and doesn’t take itself too seriously (the POWs you rescue hide the bonuses they reward you with behind a pair of striped boxers before revealing them with a flourish). the game places more of an emphasis on bombs and vehicles (not to mention violence) than other games in the genre that i’ve played, which helps give it a different feel, but otherwise there wasn’t a lot that felt unique, especially compared to the most recent game in the genre i’ve finished, gunstar heroes. the weapons feel pretty standard, as do the locales and boss fights. i went ahead and played a bit of the sequel and already it looks like it’ll be more unique, but for now i’m going to set the disc aside.

the game has a unique feel due to the distinction between enemies in the ground vs. the air, and hardcore gaming 101 notes that “it was the first vertical scrolling shooter to have backgrounds graphics that weren’t a simple starfield”. they also point out another of its unique features, which is that:

Xevious is programmed to react to the player’s behavior. If you’re too proficient at killing a certain kind of enemy, the AI will send other kinds. Similarly, when your score increases, the waves of enemies intensify. Bombing a nearby Zolbak will reduce the enemy forces’ aggressiveness for a while, making this otherwise harmless object a priority target for survival.

they also note that “Another fine example of Xevious’ well implemented difficulty setting is its sophisticated checkpoint system: if you get through more than 70% of an area and die, you’ll start your new life from the next one, thus reducing frustration,” and that “The massive enemy flying fortress Andor Genesis is considered one of the first bosses ever in the history of videogames.”

putting historical appreciation aside, from a modern perspective i found the game to have some major drawbacks. the single boss character is difficult to get past, and there’s one set of enemies in particular (called zakato apparently) that explode almost on sight and i found almost impossible to avoid. the version on namco museum megamix provides a stage select which was welcome, but otherwise the game feels like it was designed to munch quarters. i don’t see the point in the randomly hidden bonuses, and the controls felt a bit sluggish, although that could’ve been in part due to the version i played. i did enjoy the interplay between the air vs. the ground enemies and the enemies’ unique behaviors in general. the seamless transition between stages is noteworthy, but when combined with the “skip a stage if you die more than 70% through it” feature it did make tracking my progress a bit difficult.

all in all not my favorite arcade game, certainly, but enjoyable enough and a historically interesting early 2-D shooter.

for anyone who doesn’t already know, rampage casts you as one of three monsters (basically king kong, godzilla, and a huge werewolf), and your only goal is to “rampage” from single-screen city to single-screen city, punching all the buildings enough so that they crumble to the ground. i have vague memories of seeing rampage in arcades when i was a kid (i think partly because it was memorable that when you’re defeated your naked untransformed human self slinks off screen) and a big draw was that you could play with not just one other person, but two. the game has the same mindless co-op appeal typical of beat-’em-ups, but the premise gives the setting and gameplay (or “theme and fun” as nintendo power would call it) a unique feel. for 1986 the game is quite well presented, and the hulking monsters strike a pretty good balance of being slow-moving but still easy to control.

the game is definitely designed to be a quarter muncher, though, as it becomes immediately clear that the humans have the advantage and are going to win out in the end, especially considering that the game loops after day 128. after playing through more than 30 levels i had had enough, even though the ability to eat humans somehow never seems to get old. the three characters seem to be interchangeable (although it’s nice to see they made one of them be a female), and the different cities you visit are completely indistinguishable: the gameplay is pretty much exactly the same from level to level. if i’d actually had to pump in real quarters to a machine i would’ve strategized a bit more, but it’s hard to imagine progressing very far on one quarter even with the optimum strategy in place (chasing a high score isn’t emphasized much here since there are unlimited continues). the human sprites, bullets, and items are all a bit too small, so much so that i don’t even recall seeing many of the items that are apparently in the game.

despite these complaints, the game is mindless fun and good for a half hour of co-op gaming. it’s fairly easy to accidentally punch or jump on your buddy, but that just adds to the co-op entertainment factor. on the boyfriend-o-meter this one scored surprisingly high, and i suspect that it’ll also be enjoyed by similarly casual gamers.